My heart almost stopped me half a step, but my head stubbornly pushed the rest of my body forward. One leg at a time. All of a sudden, everything around us was a movie accelerated to its limits. Frames changing at a frantic pace.

I didn't hear that.

I was quickly caught up with, and Kendrick, stopping in front of me, blocked my path, forcing me to stop. His amber eyes were wide open, as if he had just woken up from a trance, and this time they revealed every hidden emotion. The fog seemed to be thinning, suddenly increasing visibility.

"Ever since Lorelei, I've tried to keep my friends out of harm's way. All of a sudden, you showed up and you were the thing that threatened them. Over time, I began to understand that it was not you who was the threat, until finally, one day, I saw what it was and what threatened you," he spoke in a hurry, but the seriousness beating from him from a mile and it involuntarily slowed down his next words. "When I found that pink note on the floor in your bathroom, the one with your cousin's threat, I felt a shadow of fear for the first time. Fear about you."

I couldn't move.

He lowered his head, letting out his breath. The suspended gaze exposed so much, as opposed to the one of enigmatic contemplation. The one that hurt. ​

"That's a part of what I meant today. It's not only that I'm leaving."

"You may not believe this, but I don't want you to disappear from my life."
​

The caramel look was never so innocent. Peeled from the facades of his own masks. Devoid of coldness, skepticism, hostility. Exposing his whole soul to the real world. Unavoidable. Contrasting with the cold night. Like a sunrise, always heralding something good. Warmth.

"Even when I'm in Sweden, I want to know where you are, whether you're safe, or you live with your family, or you live somewhere completely alone, on the other side of the world, or..."

He sank into all the "ifs" until he snapped out of it when he was out of breath. Emotions ran wild in him, which was not a frequent sight. Almost unheard of. I saw something I didn't want in his eyes. In his quick words, wide open eyelids. It wasn't natural, and I understood why something opposite to what I expected was fueling me: something cold.

He was scared. He was afraid of everything that had anything to do with me. The thought of me made him fear. And this fear was to extend beyond the dimensions of the human concept of time and space.

I involuntarily shook my head, listening to him, until I finally took advantage of his moment of breathing and filling the space between us with the steam from his mouth, I replied:

"You can't."

At these words Kendrick straightened up, frowning in surprise. The twinkle in his eye told me he'd noticed my coldness. He opened his mouth, but I didn't let him get the word out.​

"I saw with my own eyes what Lorelei did without even being in your lives. I do not intend to follow in her footsteps," I emphasized the last words, sharpened by firmness. Or at least by what seemed like firmness.

If it hadn't been for the first passing mention of their old friend, I wouldn't have understood the details until that night. The way Valentia asked me a few questions too many, but kept me at a safe distance. How their memorable argument in the Kendrick family's living room was really about more than me. How Kendrick defended his loved ones, how he noticed my scars before I even got the new ones.

How behind the pain of my betrayal was this old one, making them suffer with a doubled force. How forgiving me cost them twice as much. Especially since the first time there was no one left to forgive.

Kendrick's shoulders were weighed down by a new-found pain, an old distrust. I didn't want to add to the day-to-day fear.

I felt, though, that it wouldn't solve everything. Even if it all ended that very second. It seemed that the first blank pages of the next chapter had already been filled.

I didn't want to write what Lorelei once wrote. Therefore, the only way out was not to write anything more.

"By cutting yourself off from me, that's what you're gonna do. Don't you see that?" Kendrick suddenly found himself right in front of me, his eyes full of confusion. He knew what I meant. But he didn't understand why it was in my head in the first place. "You want everything under control so badly, you didn't notice when you lost it."

In the past, I would have responded coldly, nipping the conversation in the bud. At that moment, my cool gaze began to melt under the influence of the living fire in the eyes so close to me. This time it was me who frowned, barely accepting the drastically laid out truth, the version I didn't know. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

"Now you're ready to drop everything because of your cousin, instead of reporting her to the police and not looking over your shoulder. From the very beginning this whole cold attitude thing you put on was your only fear. You said it yourself yesterday."

I took a deep breath, not taking my eyes off him. If his words weren't true, they might have hurt me. I felt that I had been given a new perspective and it would not have been acceptable under any other circumstances. Fear. Apparently, it was circling them as thickly as the pain.

Or maybe the fear was the pain of the future.

"That's why I know you can't follow it. Just like this."

It was a stalemate.

Our fears were facing each other, gumming each other up, with no way around. The ache of my heavily moving chest mirrored the shadow of helplessness looming over the amber irises. The warmth of our breath filled the heavy air between us.

It was a stalemate.

Only then did I notice that the wind began to swirl around the small park, rustling the leaves along the path and lifting them high up. And it caught my attention because one of the leaves suddenly caught on the side of my ponytail.

It took me out of the thought, and I didn't think I've been the only one. Kendrick frowned, not expecting it. Perhaps he also noticed the frozen time just now.

When I reached for the leaf, Kendrick automatically made the same move at the exact same moment. He was a millisecond faster, because instead of the side of my head, I suddenly touched the top of his hand. I looked at him in surprise.

The boy gently removed a dry leaf from my hair, his eyes as calm as the earlier fog, stuck in me. He let it go without lowering his hand, and it seemed to me that there was a vague hesitation in his eyes. Seeing no reaction from me, he put his hand on my cheek. It was cold, but I could barely feel it.

I closed my eyes, feeling how the pinch in my chest got less painful. A moment later, he put his forehead against mine. His warm breath pierced through the chill in every sense of the word. With a force I didn't quite know, I placed my hand more firmly on his, almost grasping it. And just like that, my muscles relaxed. I was able to release the air held at the bottom of my lungs.

"There's another part of what I told you."

I opened my eyes only to see his eyelids closed.

"I don't want to lose another person I trust."
The ice in my chest was gone.

Previously galloping heart seemed to stop.

We trusted each other.

I closed my eyes in relief. Many memories have clouded my field of vision over the past months, especially this last one. How many obstacles we encountered and how many of them we managed to get around to end up here. I was trying to understand what made our paths cross so many times. It was like something was pulling them together as soon as they started running in opposite directions. How unlikely and yet inevitable it all was.

In an instant, I knew what it was. And I put the answer to all the questions on one card.

"What if we give in to fate?"

Kendrick moved his head away from mine, and when I looked at him, he was still close, but definitely taken by surprise. He made the same face he always did when something got him thinking, curious.

"Fate?"

I nodded.

"We are constantly thinking about some ideal solution, afraid that we will regret something, but maybe all it takes is just giving in to the future?" I explained, still trying to get used to this kind of vulnerability. His eyes gradually began to fill with understanding. "Fate has brought us together many times without our help, so why not let it do it again?"

This solution sounded abstract, uncertain, and even highly questionable when I said it out loud, but it was a way to leave both my and his concerns to a third force. From above, below, or wherever. No pacts, no commitments, no disappointments. To turn the pain of the future into something completely new, better, full of peace, freedom and hope, and the pain of the past into a powerless, insignificant and dead chapter of life that no longer had control over any of us. Not defining us in any way.

It did not require breaking off contact, or forever wondering, worrying about the other person's life. It was something in between, giving more freedom, but also more possible endings. Including the less colorful ones.

It was stepping into the unknown, but a warm gleam of honey eyes assured me that the unknown was worth discovering. Worth a try.

"Fine."

There was a smile on his face that was impossible not to reciprocate.

Because that was how it all was.

Fine.

On the way back to the party, there was silence surrounding us for a few minutes. It wasn't awkward or heavy. Rather, it was filled with thoughts, visions of the future, and in my case, learning about a new feeling that was trapped in my chest instead of a painful sting. It was definitely better, positively surprising and fresh.

We passed only traffic lights and the edges of the endless forest. Kendrick apparently felt overwhelmed by the monotony of the route, so he decided to break the silence.

"What are you gonna do?"

The first thought in my head was my mother's identical words. A question she asked me just a night ago.

I only looked at him for half a second, then I went back to focusing on the road and answered this completely unexpected question directly.

"For now, I'm gonna get to your farewell party without an emergency sideline driving."

I smiled a little myself when I heard a brief sound of amusement.

"What about later than today?"

And the question of the future also stirred up other emotions in me. The desire to hide under the ice was much less, if not negligible. In fact, I wanted to delve into the following days, months without feeling fear, anxiety. Suddenly it was possible. Not fully, but the visions of the next stages of my life were no longer shrouded in dark, dense clouds.

I stopped at a red traffic light. At what I saw with the eyes of my imagination, I almost smiled wider. However, I started from the end, speaking about it for the first time, I believed. Before, it was a blurry, unreal goal.
But most of all, I saw a pair of green, happy eyes.

"I want to do fashion in Italy, so first of all I will finish the course, pass the exam and get a certificate."

It took Kendrick a while to come to conclusion.

"Are you back on course?"

I looked at his surprise, and there was more to it than that. Maybe hope? Relief?

"When my mother called me with the news about Rita, she also told me to decide where I would live, and preferably if I would back to Italian."

The guy next to me blinked, frowning. He didn't know what happened after I left the hospital. I forgot that he had completely missed the fact of me reconciling with my mother, so he combined a few different pieces of information, drawing even more conclusions.

"So... Wait." His face was still covered in subtle confusion. He held out his hand, giving himself a metaphorical space to think. He looked at me carefully. "If you go back to the course, does that mean you'll live here?"

The lights turned green, which I barely noticed. I kind of regretted that I missed his full reaction.

"Looks like it."

And I knew it as soon as I saw Ben's room. As if it was where the important parts of my life began and ended. I didn't mind it.

At that point, Kendrick thought the same thing.

"Then Ben will have to suffer from your presence a little longer."

I gave him an amused look, which he returned, and I focused on the road. He was absolutely right. Even so, the vision of monotonous, months-long study suddenly became much more bearable.

Another few minutes passed in silence, which was accompanied only by the noise of the engine. There was something comforting about it. However, it gave space for new thoughts. Holding the steering wheel in my hands, I returned my thoughts to my family, including my extended family and even non-family. As if every tree that the car had passed was a memory, appearing and disappearing in a split second, creating a blurred but unified picture.

Minutes later, I parked in the Kendrick family driveway and turned off the engine. All the counters have lost their light, contrasting with the glow from inside the house. The music came out strong enough to reach the ground under the car with the bass.

I was reaching for my seat belt when the hand of the person next to me stopped me in the meantime. I lifted my head to find out why, but before I could say anything, Kendrick kissed me, longer than the last time. His lips were still cold from the chill weather.

As he moved away, a half-smile appeared on his face, and a warmth was in his eyes, reaching all the way to my chest. I'd forgotten what his look of distrust looked like.

"Now we can go and see what fate has in store for us." He pulled away as if nothing had happened, unbuckled his seatbelt and smoothly got out of the car.

I took a deeper breath, regaining the feeling in my body and following him the next second. In the meantime, I allowed myself one sincere smile, hidden in the darkness, reserved only for me.

We would see.

And the rest of the night we all spent together, without dispute, fear or pain. We danced, we sang, or rather they sang, as we all put reality aside for another time. Maybe some of them were barely on their feet, some of them were full of energy, but the mood was the same. Britt and Kendrick were rapping again, Valentia was the queen of Spanish tunes on the living room table, Yvette was protecting her from falling, Tristan was sleeping on the couch, and for the first time, I saw Chucks smile. Later than sooner, but still.

I was slowly starting the next chapter, taking more confident steps in my new, real, stronger skin.

However, I hid in my subconscious the last meeting I needed to fully move forward. Although I knew it was going to be the hardest of them all.